Overview

Though dialectal language is increasingly abundant on social media, few resources exist for developing NLP tools to handle such language. We conduct a case study of dialectal language in online conversational text by investigating African-American English (AAE) on Twitter. We propose a distantly supervised model to identify AAE-like language from demographics associated with geo-located messages, and we verify that this language follows well-known AAE linguistic phenomena. In addition, we analyze the quality of existing language identification and dependency parsing tools on AAE-like text, demonstrating that they perform poorly on such text compared to text associated with white speakers.